---

Nuclear Industry

That is my experience when talking to my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Anne Moffat), who has Torness power station in her area, as with the hon. Members around the Hunterston B power station in Scotland. People there are very supportive of the nuclear industry. We went to Canada and found very much the same—people there would gladly have taken another station. In fact, I understand that different parts of Canada have been bidding for the waste facility, since the very substantial report put together by a former United Nations environmental commissioner for the Parliament of Canada. The last question about capacity is about the capacity to manufacture. From my information from talking to people in the field, I worry that the large castings industry—the steel industry required to cast the pressure vessels—is very under-supplied at the moment. The Americans have no capacity at all, because they pulled out of nuclear. I was recently in the Framatome processing site in France, which four years ago the Government were planning to shut down. The new chief executive of Areva convinced them not to. Areva took over Framatome, which it is now investing in and expanding. They were creating pressure vessels for Three Mile Island and for Florida—in fact, they had just finished a 200-tonne pressure vessel for Florida, which was about to go out of the door when we were there. But there is no capacity in the US. There is capacity in Japan and talk of new build for manufacture in Korea and other places, but at the moment people are booking slots for pressure vessels without any customers. They are booking them four years ahead, so that when they do get a customer, they have the pressure vessel to supply the nuclear power station. That is how bad things are. I think we need to get together on an EU basis—in fact, worldwide—to talk about that. I have a suggestion for the Minister. Having done a number of seminars with people in the industry and having talked to people on the financial, legal and manufacturing sides, they are in absolutely no doubt that the Government have to come up with something to secure the carbon price. We could say that the emissions trading scheme will do that, but looking at it recently—at one point, it was trading at €60, then it went down to minus—the market is far too volatile. Tinkering with the emissions trading scheme may help, but I do not think that it will do what we require it to do. My suggestion is that the Minister and the Government should think about how to get together a PILOT for the nuclear industry. Talking to people on the legal or financial side, they all have their little commercial niches and secrets, which for me recalls the days when the North sea was running down. People were hanging on to plots that they would not explore because it did not fit their commercial model, and they would not tell people what they had found. However, the Minister got involved and all that was freed up. They started to exchange information, put packages together and give up their little piece of a plot so that someone else could explore that licence area. We came up with the Buzzard field and made big finds in different areas. I think that there has just been a new one in the past month. People need to put together their knowledge and help make the market, but the Government must make that move. I do not know whether it will eventually mean, as the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford suggested, that the Government will go further and underpin the market, but we must get everyone working together to make the market before we can move forward. Part of that will involve the carbon price, and the other part depends on the will of the Government, once they have made up their mind, to sit down and put together a team to work with a purpose. Having said that, I was dismayed to find when I had my last meeting with a group that one of the companies said, ““The problem is that the next time we go across to some European organisation, the DTI team will be completely different, because the civil servants that we have worked with for the past three years will have moved on. They’ll be in agriculture or somewhere else.? The Government are shifting the very people who have built up that knowledge during the past three years to other duties because of the civil service rotation problem. It is a real problem for an industry and a company in which people commit their lives and investment capital. They put themselves on the line for their entire business life, only to find that the people in Government with whom they are working shift every three years. If we have a PILOT, let us make sure that the pilot has a crew who will be there until we end the journey.